Blaped Lapd News Today

So its, obviously, a battle. >> reporter: uphill battle does not begin to describe it. the cold case the detective opened on that bleary-eyed monday morning would lead him on a w chase of a lifetime and sha the foundations of the lapd. dates back to 1986 and a battle for the truth by the parents of ah young bride. >> we miss her every day. >> reporter: those parents are nells and loretta rasmussen. >> doesnt make any difference what day it is. its pain that is always there. theres no cure for. >...

It was a bittersweet day. a 23-year-old cold case they believed had finally been cracked, but the prime suspect worked right beside them. for the rasmussen family stephanies arrest brought back their memory of the original lapd. >> i think she was a police officer so they figured they would cover this one up. >> reporter: the family hired a prominent l.a. attorney john taylor who filed a lawsuit against detective lazarus and also the lapd claiming the department deliberately ignored crews that p...

Shooting was the same type issued by the lapd said prosecutors and was the same caliber of lazarus off-duty weapon, a .38 revolver she reported stolen two weeks after the murder. the real smoking gun was the bite mark dna found at the crime scene. >> dna was definitely the centerpiece of this case. this shows she was there. without the dna, they could not have placed her at the condo. >> reporter: and the statistics were staggering. 1.7 sextillion to one chance that the dna belonged to someone o...

The trail kept getting colder. in 1993 sherris parents would pay for the bite mark for dna but the blaped lapd declined. >> she said we dont have a suspect. if we had a suspect we would have something to match. >> reporter: so the case set for another decade. in 2004 the lapd was conducting cases on cold cases and one of them was the murder of sherri rasmuss rasmussen. it took two months to find that saliva sample buried in a refrigeration unit. the saliva was still inside and the dna was just e...

Welcome back. there was a lot at stake at the murder trial of lapd detective stephanie lazarus who stood accused of murdering sherri rasmussen. the prosecution believed the dna evidence was their smoking gun. but the defense said it was tainted. what would the jury believe? here is josh mankiewicz with the conclusion of "the smoking gun." >> reporter: it took 26 years to get here. a generation of false leads, missed opportunities. a familys frustration. a police departments nightmare. february 6...

June 5th, 2009 started routineli routinely enough for lapd detective stephanie lazarus. she took the train to union station in downtown l.a. reporting for her normal shift that morning at police headquarters in parker center. after arriving, stephanie was told to meet with two detectives, the man she didnt know from lapds elite robbery homicide division to help them interrogate a suspect involving some stolen art work which was stephanies beat as a detective. so lazarus went down to a secured ar...

Had bitten sherri rasmussen during the struggle was a female. >> reporter: a woman, not two male burglaries as the original detectives had suspected all those years. but it would take a for you more years before investigators began to understand what that crucial dna test result meant. it was now 2009 and the case was cold once again. 23 years it sat with no apparent leads, no suspects, and no answers for the rasmussen family. then came that monday after the super bowl when detective jim nutall ...

Name had come up but not as a suspect. no notes of any conversation with her? >> no paper trail. >> reporter: she seemed to be someone above suspicion. stephanie eileen lazarus had grown up in southern, california, a tom boy of sorts and loved sports. she attended ucla where she played basketball p.m. it was during her college days that she met and dated john ruetten, long before he and sherri got married. after graduating in 1982, lazarus surprised her family by joining the lapd. this when only...

They could close the deal by somehow secretly obtaining lazarus dna. she was tailed for days, as undercover cops waited for her to leave some small piece of herself behind. finally at a retail store, it happened. lazarus ordered a soft drink and drank it. a traipse of her saliva was on the straw which she then tossed in the trash. it was more than enough for testing. two dna samples separated by two decades. 48 hours later, jim nutall got call from his supervisor. >> it was real simple. he just ...

Lazarus had the means, the motive, the opportunity to kill sherry rasmussen. she seemed obsessed with john and jealous of his new wife. was she the came person was the scary eyes stalking sherri. >> reporter: sherris purse and all of its contents stolen during the crime were recovered soon after the murder except for one item inside. >> the only thing to this day that was never recovered was john and sherris marriage certificate. >> reporter: after three months of intense secretive investigation...